Regarding fan commentary and criticism more generally:

I can’t read that stuff. If someone said something mean, I would go fetal, which I’ve done before. I remember reading one of our first pieces of major press when we were a young band. It said that I wore unfashionably large glasses. Then it was like, “and plays really great music,” or whatever, but for me it was always the unfashionably large glasses. I went into a tailspin: Should I get new glasses? Should I keep wearing them to pretend that I don’t care even though it killed me? So now if I read, “In ’97 they used to play more notes in ‘Reba,’” I’d be like: “You want more notes? O.K.! How many more?” So I can’t pay attention to that.

The always insightful Ari Kohen:

Every terrible thing can be terrible in its own way and not everything must be Auschwitz in order to summon sufficient moral outrage.

and

“Never Again” is too lightly tossed around, but it also cannot possibly be understood to mean only “Never Again to the Jews” or “Never Again a place exactly like Auschwitz.” What I and a great many other descendants of Holocaust survivors learned from our family members — and what AOC and Eli Valley are attempting to bring home to others — is that when bigotry, xenophobia, and nationalism are allowed to flourish, detention camps and human rights abuses are never far behind.

Read the whole thing.

I give them nine out of 10 chance of getting it right.... I have not seen anyone actually deploy anything like this to a billion people. The actual techniques are pretty well known in the scientific sense. But actually implementing this will be pretty impressive.

– Matthew Green, a cryptographer at Johns Hopkins University

Jamelle Bouie is too charitable.

General wariness of being analyzed (tracked) hasn’t yet begun.

General wariness of being analyzed (tracked) hasn’t yet begun.

The exact focus of the Justice Department’s investigation is unclear.

Look I’d jump at the chance to trust bust Google, but this smells of political payback to me. Particularly because recently the FTC has been handling antitrust regulation of tech in general and Google in particular and Republicans are all upset about perceived mistreatments like shadow banning and deplatforming.

Dani Deahl for The Verge:

It’s critical that metadata is distributed and entered accurately, not just for a song or album’s discoverability, but because metadata helps direct money to all the folks who made that music when a song is played, purchased, or licensed. Documenting everyone’s work is also important because, “That attribution could be how someone gets their next gig,” says Joshua Jackson, who leads business development for Jaxsta, an Australian company that authenticates music information.

Farhad Manjoo for The New York Times:

As Brendan Nyhan of the University of Michigan has pointed out, while it’s reasonable to worry about lies online, what we should really be up in arms about are the lies of “elites” — politicians, anchors, pundits and their spin doctors — who transform latent misinformation into comprehensive narratives of untruth.

A good take overall, but still lets social media off the hook too easily.

Here’s to the writers in lonely rooms. Here’s to their funny hats. And here’s to imagination.